


This Is Not An Origin Story

by plinys



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, And tbh the relationship can be read as purely platonic but whatever, Female Friendship, Female Tony Stark, Female-Centric, Gen, I tagged it as shippy, Sexist Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-02
Updated: 2014-09-02
Packaged: 2018-02-15 22:33:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2245815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The government sees a vigilante and labels it a villain, because it’s not something that they can control or understand, but Toni likes it better that way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Is Not An Origin Story

**Author's Note:**

> A little over a week ago, I wrote a sort of extensive [meta](http://plinys.tumblr.com/post/95839305600/if-iron-man-was-a-woman-wouldnt-she-be-a-villain) over on tumblr about why a female "Tony Stark" wouldn't have ended up the flashy hero that we know Iron Man as, but rather as a character that is depicted by the media to be a villain. After, writing said meta, I was pushed by a handful of people to write a fic about it, and so this is that story.

This Is Not An Origin Story

“My father always wanted a son,” she says at a funeral one cold December night, “I know you’re not supposed to talk bad about the dead, but I always wondered would my life have been different, would it been better, if I had been the son my father so clearly wanted? I always meant to ask him that one day,” she laughs bitterly, scrubs at her eyes searching for tears that aren’t there, willing them to spill from her eyes even though she knows they’ll remain dry, “guess now I’ll never have the chance.”

Before the end of the ceremony she sneaks off to the bathroom, squirts eye drops into her eyes, so they’re as wet as everybody expects, so she can play the act of the sad little Stark girl in mourning.

That’s what they all expect her to be, and if Antonia Stark had learned anything in her life, being what people expected of her was always easier than being who she truly was.

She’s a billionaire at nineteen, and suddenly everybody forgets about all the hard work she did before this, degrees from MIT mean nothing when every paparazzo can turn a camera in her directon and ask, “Is little Miss Stark too emotionally distressed to run a multi-billion dollar corporation?”

She hates the headlines.

Honestly she doesn’t think that they could get worse than that.

Until a week later she’s reading some magazine, whose name she cannot seem to remember, and there’s a picture of her going out to get the mail, followed by a critique of her outfit.

“I was in my pajamas, I’d just woken up,” she grumbles to herself, but nobody’s listening, nobody ever listens to a woman like her.

She learned that lesson long ago as a child, at fancy dinner parties that she had been forced to attend with her parents.

She would watch with wide eyes as her mother would say something deep and insightful, something important, only to be brushed over, then she would watch as her father repeated the same words moments later, and suddenly they were the most noteworthy thing in the world.

“It’s all part of the game, Antonia,” her mother had said at the time, pressing kisses into her curls when she insisted that it wasn’t _fair_ , “life’s never going to be fair or easy for us, but we rise above it all. We put on our dresses and pearls like armor and we endure.”

She remembers those words when she stands in a board of directors meeting at twenty-one, _her_ board of directors for _her_ company, as they seem to forget her and ignore her presence.

When her words are repeated in Obadiah’s firm tone, and suddenly taken for fact, she clenches her hand into a fist behind her back and smiles like the heiress she’s supposed to be.

“You don’t have to come to these meetings,” he tells her later when she paces angrily about her office, the one with the big windows and the picture of her father in the corner staring her down when she thinks she’s about to make a grave mistake, “it’s just a bunch of boring business talk, nothing to worry your pretty little head about.”

And she figures, fine, if they don’t want her there, then fuck it.

Fuck all of it.

\---

Little Antonia, Howard Stark’s quaint little daughter, becomes Toni, every public relations department’s worst nightmare and every reporters wet dream.

She makes a scene, spectacularly.

Acts the part of the spoiled little heiress that she has tried her whole life to avoid, nobody cares about her merits or her degrees, they just want to see some Hollywood glam princess, and she is more than happy to oblige them.

Might as well give the public what they so clearly desire.

She buys over sized sunglasses and skirts that are more than just a bit too short, gets drunk on Hollywood boulevard and attends movie premieres where everybody knows her name. She kisses A-List stars for the world to see and flips off the cameras when they get in her face.

The next time a magazine thinks to call her a floozy or says her lipstick looks tacky, she spends some small portion of her millions of dollars to buy them out and fire everybody on staff.

The new office is made up of purely women.

All pretty girls that she hit on during their interviews until one of them stared her straight in the eyes and asks, “Will that be all, Miss Stark?”

She hired her on the spot for a completely different and has never regretted it, though she’s not sure that the other woman felt the same.

(She fondly remembers one night in particular, where her lifesaver of a personal assistant stepped in to pepper spray some guy that had been getting a bit too handsy with the CEO of Stark Industries. Though later she would argue that that didn’t warrant a whole new nickname, but really Toni insisted.)

Pepper, her lifesaver, reteaches Toni all the lessons that she had forgotten from those days with her mother, together they stand up straight, tilt their chins up, and walk forward like they’re plotting a murder.

And maybe they are.

The crowds learn to part when she shows up, people stop trying to step in her way, and every holiday possible Toni makes sure to buy Pepper the biggest and best gifts that she can find. Including but not limited to: over sized chocolate bars, over sized stuffed animals, and over sized cars. If it comes in a jumbo size Toni buys it.

(Pepper drives a Humvee with style.)

\---

As far as the cameras are concerned Toni Stark is a mess, likely to drink herself into an early grave, and hook up with every A-Lister that she can manage to get her greedy little hands on.

When the cameras are turned off she sits in the basement of her over sized townhouse and creates things that would remind the world that she’s a college educated woman, that she has power in her own right.

If she could ever get the credit for them.

Stark Industries comes out with the best weapons there are, something her World War II fighting father might have been jealous of, the research and development department is thanked extensively, and Toni tries not to be bitter when she sees that it’s her work being shown off.

She tells herself that technically it’s still her name on everything, her name on the side of the building, and reasons that that is all the credit she will ever be getting.

There’s a bottle of wine that had been sent over for her, a thank you from her board of directors and military contracts, she tries not to feel too bitter when she drinks it down.

When Pepper finds her the next morning passed out on her workshop couch with an empty bottle of wine on the ground she doesn’t even have to ask.

Still, Toni manages to grumble out, “I hate everyone,” under her breath.

“Everyone?”

“Yes, everyone,” Toni insists, because she’s hangover and sort of miserable, "everyone except you."

\---

She’s in Vegas.

Hiding in a casino instead of accepting an award that isn’t even really for her, it’s for the company, and since her name is on the ledger, since her father was the founder, she’s expected to stand up there and thank whatever little military man they’ve sent this time to give her the biggest thanks the United States Government can manage.

She huffs a breath in disbelief over the notion that she would even enjoy such a thing, and spends the night instead playing poker with people she’s never met before, betting away money that others only dreamed of.

Somehow the little award still ends up in her hands anyways, accompanied by a stern look from Obadiah, an almost lecture on keeping up public appearances, and other nonsense that she promptly tunes out.

At least this way she manages to avoid any headlines criticizing her choice of clothing, instead tomorrow she’ll see something about her missing in action and minor speculation that’s easy enough to burn in her over sized fireplace.

She likes to the burn the newspapers; it is always a tiny bit satisfying, watching their words crinkle into the nothingness that they truly are.

She still hates reporters, which is why when she’s out the door and heading to the car that’s waiting to take her back to Malibu, and a reporter gets in her way, Toni doesn’t even bother to hide her scowl.

The report is an overly eager woman, with blond hair framing her face, and pictures in her hands that she insists that Toni needs to see.

She doesn’t look at the pictures, just fixes the woman a look that she hopes is something close enough to a glare, that will get her to back off and perfectly exemplify all of Toni’s distaste for the press.

It doesn’t work, for a moment later, Miss Christine Everhart introduces herself and her magazine, and insists that this is a pressing issues.

Something inside of Toni decides to be considerate and she doesn’t flag over the guards that have been watching them and instead gives a little nod to tell her to go on.

“When is Stark Industries going to take action for this,” she accuses.

These are not accusations that Toni is unfamiliar with.

So she opens her mouth to parrot back the usual statement, the one that her board of directors had prepared for her many years before, when she was still just getting her feet wet with the notion of being the sole inheritor of a weapon’s manufacturing company and all the bad press that came along with that.

“Our contracts with the government not only fund weapons production, but also things like Intel-Crops, which helps make food for third world countries or-“

“Selling weapons to terrorists, helps makes food for third world countries,” the reporter snaps back.

And something inside of her freezes up at once, suddenly she’s actually looking at the pictures not skimming over things, and she’s seeing the facts before her eyes.

“Where did you get these?”

“I have more where those came from,” the reporter says instead.

“On you?”

She nods her head once, but it’s a sort of anxious nervous nod, as if she’s worried that Toni is about to send her guards to confiscate the evidence and bury it further. She supposes somebody else in her position might have.

Obadiah would have.

But he’s not here now, having abandoned her in the casino after she dismissed the award she didn’t even want.

So it appears for the first time in a long time she has a chance to take matters into her own hands.

“Fancy a drive to Malibu?”

“My office is in Los Angeles,” she nods once more.

When she invites her into her the backseat of her limo, it’s not with some quip about how she’d be more than happy to stay up all night with her, they’re not having some hot version of hate sex in the back of the car.

Not that Toni would have minded.

(She wasn’t picky and cute girls really about summed up her type, but there was a time for passionate hookups and time for business, and this sadly was not the type for hookups.)

Instead they’re pouring over documents and photos, and she’s listening with horror to the things _her_ company has done.

“I didn’t know, I honestly – they never let me attend the meetings, just tell me where to sign and when to smile,” she admits, the dread bubbling up inside of her.

There’s nothing more sobering than realizing the horrors that she’s been unknowingly funding

Because it’s her name stamped on the box, on the sides of the weapons that are currently in those terrorists hands.

Resolving to do something about it is only natural.

She likes to think that anybody in her position would have done the same, but she’s not one hundred percent sure that she believes that.

\---

Pepper arrives in the morning, not to take out the _trash_ but to help them sort through this mess to try to get to the bottom of these things.

It’s secretive, red level security clearance; nothing gets out, because she’s not sure who she can trust.

Nobody, a voice in the back of her head, says.

But for some reason she expands her tightly wound boundaries to include the two other people sitting with her in her circle of trust.

She spends the day sitting in her Malibu townhouse pouring over pictures and news reports and things that she would like to pretend that she doesn’t believe.

She doesn’t want to believe them.

She wants some excuse, some explanation neatly wrapped up to her and presented by the people whose jobs it is to know about these things and stop her, but none of that appears.

And so, Toni continues to dig through the mess and has her eyes opened in the process.

There’s no trip to Afghanistan to distract her from this, to make her forget about illegal operations inside her company and instead spend all of her focus on staying alive.

There’s no shrapnel cutting through her skin, no caves that are dark and damp and smell like death, no old familiar face from a conference she had long since forgotten about.

They don’t send women to give weapon’s presentations, nobody would take her seriously.

That’s what was always said whenever she asked why she couldn’t go along.

For once their sexist standards save her life, but she doesn’t even notice.

There is a call around noon though, from Obadiah, telling her how the presentation overseas went, giving her little excuses and making small talk, before telling her not to worry her pretty little head about anything, just to let the big boys do the work.

She all most asks him about what Christine had shown her, almost foolishly questions whether they’re double dealing or not.

But she remembers lessons as a child, sitting on a little chair by her mother’s vanity mirror, as Maria explained to her the ways of the world, how men didn’t like to be questioned, that she should smile and nod her head and plan her revenge where nobody could see.

So, Toni holds her tongue, congratulates him on the successful presentation.

Rather than scaring him into action that she is not yet prepared to deal with, there will be time for that later.

At least, she hopes there will be.

\---

Sometime around midnight she remembers that it is – or well, was - Pepper’s birthday and insists that they make a cake.

One with extra icing and sprinkles, just the way she liked it.

The whole thing is mostly an excuse for them to take a break, because the three of them have been at this for hours with no sign of an end in sight.

The only cake pan she has is a gag gift that she bought herself on her twenty-first birthday.

So they eat cake shaped like men’s genitalia as they make their plans, while they plot to find a way to fix this whole mess.

Christine casually remarks that they should have put a cream filling on the inside and Toni laughs so hard that she can almost ignore how the cake only tastes bittersweet.

\---

There’s a confrontation that needs to happen, so she gets dressed in the best pantsuit she owns the next Monday. She even let’s Pepper help her straighten her hair, and does that fancy thing with her eyeliner that makes men quiver in their boots.

Toni feels a bit like she’s arming herself for war and suddenly wishes they made bullet-proof corsets.

As impractical as that would be, it would feel a lot more like the armor she so desperately desired, than this fancy get up does.

It’s faux-casual when she asks about it, sitting in the desk that she so rarely sees anymore, in an office that technically still belongs to her.

Her legs are crossed daintily and ladylike, her brows arched and curious, and as she speaks she’s staring at the picture of her father that was never taken down,  but her words are for the man standing in the room pouring himself a glass of something too expensive to be drinking at this time of day.

“There was this reporter,” she explains, trying to keep the fury out of her voice, because this isn’t an accusation not just yet, its curiosity and as of yet she has no reason not to trust Obadiah,  “she accused me, us,” she corrects, “of double dealing, selling weapons to terrorists.”

He doesn’t answer her for a long moment after that, the only sound between them is the ice in his drink hitting against the sides of the glass.

“We’re not, right?”

“No,” he finally says, “of course not.”

“But then how-“

“If American bases were attacked our weapons may have ended up in the wrongs hands, we may even have a leak,” he says it like it is all speculation at this point, “look what do you want me to say? That I’ll look into it for you?”

The truth.

That’s what she wants.

But pretty little flowers never ask for that so she nods her head.

“Then consider it done,” he says, squeezing her shoulder as he sets a glass on the desk for her to drink, “don’t you worry yourself about this, good ole Obie will get this one sorted out for you, until then you just keep your head down and stay out of the way, okay, sweetheart?”

She makes a vague noise of agreement.

That seems to settle that and he’s on his way out the door when she stops and turns around to stare at her, “what did you say the name of the reporter was?”

She’s not sure why she feels the need to lie, when she says, “oh I don’t remember, I was pretty drunk Obie,” in a fake giggling tone, she’s just lucky that he pretends to buy it.

(Later when she’s got a phone cradled between her shoulder and ear calling Christine just to double check that she is alright on a secure phone line, she pretends it is not paranoia that motivates her to make sure that Christine hadn’t gotten into any mysterious car accidents on her way home.)

She doesn’t drink the glass, not while he’s there, and not even after he leaves.

When she dumps it out into the trash, she remembers jokes that used to be made about poison, and feels her stomach churn.

Obadiah wouldn’t hurt her; he was like a mentor to her, the father she never had.

Which wasn’t saying much or anything but, it had to count for something.

All the father figures in her life had pretty much been total shit.

She throws the whole bottle of expensive whiskey into the trash on her way out the door, and ignores the almost ghostly stare of the portrait in the corner of the office.

\---

It’s not that she doesn’t trust Obadiah to sort it out.

(She doesn't.)

It’s just that after a week with no new answers something has to be done; she can’t just sit around and wait for nothing any longer.

So she tells Pepper to schedule her a press conference, calls Christine and gives her the details of what she wants leaked to the papers ahead of time, and gets ready to face the music.

She dresses in yet another pantsuit, but let’s her curls stay this time, standing out and framing her face.

If she looks in the mirror she can almost see sweet little Antonia underneath all the layers of makeup and lies.

But she puts on the cherry red lipstick and bears her teeth and suddenly Toni is back in her place.

\---

Her fingers drum against the microphone stand in an anxious rhythm as she waits for everyone to take their seats, wait for the announcement to be made. There’s note-cards on the podium carefully prepared for her by the best assistant in the world, but she doesn’t look at them even once.

Instead, she stares out at the audience and says, “certain things have recently come to light, things that I was not aware of, things that really do terrify me, I lay awake at night thinking about them,” and suddenly those standing in the audience, her board of directors, her so-called mentor must see what she’s about to say because they take steps forward trying to stop the press conference, but it’s too late and the next words that come out seal all of their fates, “in order to combat this breach of security, Stark Industries will no longer be manufacturing weapons.”

The crowd erupts at her declaration, all but one of the reporters leaping to their feet, businessmen looking downright appalled, the cameras flash as she says, “I won’t be taking questions at this time,” and proceeds to exit stage left.

(The way the crowd surges behind her getting louder and louder, she almost feels a bit Shakespearean in her exit, though there’s no bear on her heels.)

\---

The newsreels that night will say things about how people should sell their stock, how Stark Industries is a sinking ship, and that really they’ve been heading this way since that tragic accident back in _1991._

(She almost agrees with the last point.)

One reporter actually has the nerve to say, “and this is why women can’t be in positions of power,” they’ll insist that she’s soft, that she’s insane, that she’s a bitch, somebody makes a joke asking if she was PMS-ing.

Pepper reluctantly informs her that “no, you cannot buy Fox News,” which really isn’t fair at all.

Apparently there are some laws about how many news outlets she can own, and selling one of them apparently does not solve the problems.

“What’s the point of being a billionaire if I can’t buy out all the news stations that talk shit about me?”

There’s a dismissive eye roll from her personal assistant, before she says, “clearly there isn’t one,” in the most sarcastic tone that Pepper Potts can muster.

\---

She’s drunk off her ass and watching Robocop when the idea comes to her, like a flash of lightening or a strike of brilliance or something more poetic that she can muster at the moment, “that’s what we need,” she slurs at the screen, and Pepper, who still happens to be around working on paperwork and pretending she isn’t waiting for her boss to drink herself to death, just sighs.

“You want me to call up the governor,” Pepper asks, purposely being obtuse.

She does that sometimes, being obtuse, it’s weirdly endearing.

“No,” Toni groans in response tossing a pillow her way, “You’re thinking of the Terminator.”

“My mistake,” she replies, still heavy on the sarcasm.

“What I _meant_ ,” Toni says putting stress weird on her words, “is that we need a robot-cop-guy thing, you know, somebody to show up and do the shooting and fix this for me! JARVIS,” she class up over her shoulder to the ceiling something she only does when she’s most certainly drunk, “I should have made you a badass butt kicking body!”

Before she passes out that night she tells JARVIS to record her train of thought and rattles off all sorts of ideas, saves the project as _Robocop_ , but she doesn’t bother to make sure that it is kept on her private servers, because she figures that when she wakes up it will sound like the dumbest idea in the world.

And maybe, she doesn’t sleep the whiskey off, because as she drinks her morning coffee, it still sounds like a brilliant idea.

“I’m going to make a robotic suit,” Toni announces to Pepper while they share a plate of pancakes at a diner with a name that Toni’s going to forget as soon as they leave.

“Like Robocop,” she grimaces, pushing Toni’s fork away as she does so.

“Exactly, except you know, more _me._ ”

\---

She spends the next three days locked down in her lab making all of her childhood dreams of becoming a superhero come true.

She considers the patriotic color scheme for about ten minutes, before she passes on it because she’s not Captain-Fucking-America.

(No matter how much certain relations of her wished that she had been.)

She’s Toni Stark.

And Toni Stark is a staple of originality.

So she paints it red like her favorite lipstick or the blood of her enemies depending on who is asking, and gold like the money in her bank account.

Flashy and in their face, exactly the thing that she wants to be, and exactly the sort of thing she was told never to be.

\---

There are about two hours that she spends contemplating making it a drone, but then remembers every cheap sci fi movie that she has ever seen that pretty much spells out exactly why that course of action is a completely terrible one.

She’s already living in Smart House, it’s probably best not to chance the whole iRobot thing as well.

Plus, there is just something about the idea of flying around in the thing that is oddly appealing to her.

“This is going to be so kickass,” she whispers to herself as she sets the thing to finally compute and build itself, “I’m going to be so kickass.”

The first test of the propulsion system clues Pepper into what she’s doing as the glass walls of her underground laboratory come shattering down, take two puts a hole in the roof, take three ends up with her in the hospital for a sprained wrist and the papers making all sorts of jokes about Toni Stark getting so drunk at a party that she breaks her wrist.

She hasn’t been to a proper party in months.

It’s all bullshit anyways.

Right now she doesn’t need the flashing cameras and the cheap beer to give her the rush she so used to crave, instead she takes to the air like a bird, crashes like an airplane, puts herself back together like Dr Frankenstein, and determines that she should really stop with the metaphors thing like a mature adult.

\---

The first time she makes it over there, she nearly gets killed by the Air Force, nearly falls to her death in some Middle Eastern desert she doesn’t know the name of.

But it’s worth it when she remembers the relieved looks of the faces of the civilians that she had saved, and the dull satisfaction of finally doing something to take charge in _her_ company when she blows up the illegally obtained weapons.

That makes all of the danger and excitement worth it.

Though it doesn’t make the stinging ointment that Pepper rubs into her skin worth it, or the stitches that are inserted in a Malibu townhouse instead of a proper hospital, because there’s no way she could have explained to some cheery-eyed nurse why she looked like she had been through a war zone.

Without admitting that she actually had been through a war zone.

Which according to Christine, who had been phoned in after the successful mission, was only going to lead to bad press.

Tthere’s no friend in a fine pressed suit to call this a training exercise.

So when it gets leaking to the public what happened in some Middle Eastern desert, the story comes out the opposite of the truth.

There’s talk of a man in a metal suit attacking, what the press makes out, to be innocent civilians.

"Fucking Fox News,."

They don’t understand, they weren’t there standing in her shoes.

The only part they get right is that the suit was made of metal, and even that is a huge understatement.

The government sees a vigilante and labels it a villain, because it’s not something that they can control or understand, but Toni likes it better that way.

She’s spent too long playing up the role people wanted for her, and letting them be in control, as Iron Man she finally has freedom.

For the first time in her life there’s a bounty on her head, and she laughs when she reads the papers, “I am worth way more than ten thousand dollars,” she says, thinking of the picture of her on the cover of last year’s Forbes magazine.

\---

“What if I put one of those Army Strong bumper stickers on the suit,” she suggests sarcastically, “on my butt, like those cute little gym shorts that sorority girls wear-“

“They’re the Air Force,” Pepper corrects, which isn’t the point, but she’s sure she could get one of those bumper stickers if she tried, “but the answer is still no.”

“Aww, Pep,” she whines, “why do you always have to crush my hopes and dreams?”

“It’s what you pay me for.”

“I should probably pay you more.”

“Really? You’re just now realizing this?”

\---

“Iron Man,” she reads the headlines off the paper, “friend or foe?”

So they’ve given her a name.

Sort of like what they give to those superheroes in the comics she used to read as a kid, except she’s not like Captain America or Batman even, because she’s playing the bad guy in all their eyes.

The metal menace.

That’s what they label her as.

Literally.

(That's headline number two, she can't even make this shit up.)

But this is real life, not those books she used to read, and no Superman is going to come out of the sky to stop her.

“Why’d they just _have_ to assume that it was – that I am,” she corrects, “a man?”

“Perhaps ma’am if you made certain modifications to the suit,” JARVIS starts, “such as the addition of-“

“If you say breasts I’m reprogramming you to have the same voice as those gps-ladies, so choose your next words wisely.”

“The press is filled with sexist pigs.”

“And that’s the answer I was looking for,” Toni laughs, a bitter laugh that echoes around the empty laboratory.

She wonders if she should be cackling more, it’s that what villains do, cackle?

Except, Toni Stark’s no Wicked Witch of the West.

(Even if she did play one in an elementary school play too many years before to even count.)

\---

“They’re calling for an injunction,” Obadiah tells her over the phone, “insisting that with everything that’s been going on, these new revelations, that maybe you’re not the best person to be running Stark Industries.”

“But, it’s mine,” she says, feeling like a spoiled child, even as the words tumble from her lips.

This was all she had, the one thing she could hold onto, a building with her name on the side of it.

It may not have seemed like much, and Toni was never the sentimental sort, not when anybody was around to see it, but this was something else.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he never does, “look I’ll try to hold them off, fix things up, but your little press conference stunt, plus what’s going overseas, let’s just say it doesn’t look good for SI.”

She hangs up the phone before he can say anything else, tosses it across the room where it lands among a box of spare parts and she can pretend that she doesn’t see it.

She won’t let them take this away from her.

It’s too late in the night, lying awake unable to sleep when she realizes that there has to be an answer for this, something that she is not being told. There is one peg she is missing, that if she could just find would put everything together and make things make sense.

She spends the weekend having JARVIS search every Stark Industries server that she can get her hands on remotely.

When that answers none of her questions she calls Pepper up and tells her that she’s going to be going into work and getting to the bottom of this.

The “about time,” that she gives in reply reminds her how overdue this is and exactly why it needs to happen.

\---

Her skin is itching as she sits in the office building, the building they so desperately want to kick her out of.

The air in the office, _her office_ , seems more uncomfortable than it has ever been before, pressing in on her so that it’s hard to breathe.

Somebody has moved the picture of her father that’s always been up on the wall, and even though he was a terrible parent, she cannot help but feel unnerved by the lack of his painted gaze.

The computer on her desk takes too long to boot up, she nearly drops the flash drive that had been pressed between her fingers, only managing to get it in their at the last moment.

She’s not sure what she’s looking for, some sign that she’s not crazy, that it’s not just paranoia that she feels itching across her skin, that there is a reason for the unease she had felt since she stepped inside the building.

When Obadiah walks into the room like he owns the place, he nearly scares her to death, probably his intention.

(A heart attack would be awfully convenient for him, wouldn't it be?)

She tries to play it cool, reflexively pulls up a program on the computer, which just so happens to be some news site talking trash about her, again.

He looks over her shoulder once, gives her another glass to drink, that she purposely ignores.

“Don’t stress so much about what they stay,” he says, eyes still on the computer screen.

“You know me,” she tries for a fake laugh, “I’d buy out all the newspapers if I could.”

“I bet.”

It’s when their small talk is finished and he goes to leave that she can’t help but ask, “what happened to dad’s picture?”

“Who do you think filed the injunction in the first place,” he replies back just as smooth, answering her question with a question of his own so that she suddenly knows both of their answers, before stepping out the door, and there’s nothing she can do, nothing she can say.

Words fail her in the one moment she needed her mouth to work.

She wonders if he knew what she was looking through behind the fake screen, or if they just had ironic timing.

\---

Hours later she’s looking through paperwork, files, information that she had been looking for for so long.

She believes it now.

There’s no use of denying it when the evidence is spilling out right before her eyes.

The well documented proof that goes back years and years of work to undermine not only her, but the very nature of national security itself.

She had always thought that there was a leak inside Stark Industries somebody who was double dealing under the table but she have never expected – and yet, there it all was, suddenly everything made sense.

He was always planning to get rid of her, because playing the pretty figurehead only works so well.

She feels a bit like the Queen of England, if her Prime Minister was a lying piece of shit.

But there’s no crown on her head, just a suit that she steps into like a second skin.

She wonders what the knockoff that he had made for himself is like, whether he went with the drone route or encases himself in the same metal armor that she finds so comforting.

By the time the alarms on her townhouse go off, and JARVIS’s voice sounds to tell her that there has been a perimeter breach, she’s all suited up and ready to go with Pepper on speed dial, and Christine already typing up the article for tomorrow’s press release.

(Two articles actually, one assuming she wins, and another just in case Obadiah actually manages to kill her.)

She doesn’t ask how he knew it was her, or when he figured it out.

Nor does she ask him how long he had been planning to kill her and take her company away from her lifeless fingers.

Instead, she does what she has wanted to do since the first time she stood in a board room, dressed to the nines, and he patted her on the head and said, “let the big boys handle this one.”

It feels so satisfying to blast him with the repulsters.

And it’s different than when she was fixing things, because this is personal.

Maybe that’s what makes it so satisfying when she hears a sickening crunch that tells her that her hit has landed.

There’s a voice in her head that sounds oddly like her mothers, reminding her that women would dress themselves up, in fancy silk and face powders to disguise their true through and motives.

Maria used to call her eye-shadow her war paint, and taught a young Antonia how to apply it in the mirror, calling it their armor.

Now Toni is standing in real armor, her body encased, hidden away so that almost nobody could remember her.

She wonders what Maria would think of her daughter now fully grown.

“Your father helped give us the atomic bomb,” Obadiah mocks her, “where would we be if he were as self-centered as you?”

“Uh, not dead,” she says with a shrug, which is lost in the inner workings of her suit and a blast that is just this side of deadly.

His laugh comes out bitter and metallic, and she hits him with everything she’s got until it stops.

(The sound will haunt her months later when she tries to sleep. She’ll hear that laugh again and wonder if that car accident in ’91 wasn’t actually a car accident. She won’t be able to fall asleep again until JARVIS reads her off statistics about accidents on icy roadways and percentages of drunk drivers that get killed behind the wheel. She conveniently forgets that in California there wouldn’t have been an icy road.)

\---

Their final showdown takes place high above the ground, as she pushes herself to the limits and puts those degrees that everybody seems to forget she has to use. She thanks her professors at MIT who may have looked down her for being a woman or being too young, but who knew also told her what happens when you go up too high in to the atmosphere.

There’s something about having a genius IQ, and being daring enough to try stupid shit, that saves her life.

The first time she had made this mistake she ended up with a broken wrist.

The first time Obadiah makes the mistaken, in a suit much heavy than hers, he ends up in bits across the pavement.

She’s never killed anybody before.

Technically this doesn’t count either, not properly.

It’s not her fault he never figured out the freezing problem, not her fault he went falling down to the earth below with the speed of a meteor but like Icarus who had tried too foolishly to reach for something that he could never have.

Telling herself that only works for so long, then her stomach turns and the bitter taste rises up in the back of her throat, until she can no longer ignore it.

\---

She wants to get it out there, tell the truth about what happened, point out what a corrupt asshole Obadiah Stane was, and even maybe admit her role in the whole thing.

Talk about the real _woman_ inside the Iron Man.

She’s just about prepared to do it, calls up the woman she will one day hire to be her press secretary with all of the details and information demands that she releases the news, call it in inside leak or whatever.

Christine talks her down from it, talks about the implications on the grander scheme of things, the potential for this all to go tragically wrong.

“You don’t want to end up in jail do you?”

“Why would I,” she asks then stops, because it’s a silly question that she knows the answer to already.

What do all those Disney movie villains have in common?

The fact that they are women with power.

She’s too skinny to be Ursula, too young to be Lady Tremaine, but she does have sharp enough cheekbones to make Maleficent jealous.

See the thing is, there’s nothing a man fears more than a woman who can take care of herself, one with a bit _too_ much agency.

Pepper’s “damn straight,” of agreement is all the support she needed to go along with Christine’s plan.

Instead of the victorious Iron _Woman,_ she plays the role of Antonia, one she thought she had abandoned years before, on a workroom floor.

\---

She finds it ironic later that their fight took place on the _Howard Stark Memorial Highway_ , she wonders if her dear old dad would have enjoyed the irony.

(Perhaps not, but her mother would have.)

There’s a dead director and a blown up research facility, that Toni is personally calling damage control, but the press is calling a crime.

She receives her first positive headline since her parents death, the media thankful that the no longer young heiress has survived this terrible tragedy, even going so far as to send her their best wishes and offer any form of comfort that they can.

And if she milks it for all its worth than who can really blame her, she’s spent her life being told that she was wrong and awful.

She can enjoy things for a little bit, can’t she?

\---

There’s no SHIELD agent standing by to brief her, because there’s no light in her chest, nothing to tie her back to the metal _man_ , other than the blood that stains the highway red and the countless files that Obadiah had created when he had attempted to replicate the suit he had seen taking down his illegal business investments.

Her alibi isn’t good enough, wouldn’t stand up in court.

So she stands in the bathroom and squirts eye drops into her eyes, just as she had done what felt like a lifetime before at another funeral. She rubs them until they’re raw and red, leaves her curls in disarray and makes sure that she looks like a proper mess.

Pepper straightens her shirt collar on the way out in a way that is too soft not to be fondness.

She knows. (Pepper’s always known.)

And so does Christine, because if anybody was going to be able to spin this tale it would be her.

But as far as the rest of the world is concerned this is a tragic moment for her, she needs to be the women they all expect her to be, the one who throws trashy parties and has no clue what she’s doing.

Like a child playing pretend in her mother’s closet, she takes the few steps up to the podium, remembering the last time she was speaking at a funeral.

When she stands up for the crowd with their flashing camera, and calls him her “dear friend and mentor,” when she forces out the words “terrible tragedy” and “he will be mourned by all who knew him,” she tries not to taste the blood in the back of her throat while the poison spews from her lips.

The lies are so much easier to tell than the truth, so much more believable.

(Saying he was like a father to her is an easier one to say, because Toni Stark never really had all that many positive male influences in her life.)

She’s feeding them exactly what they want to hear, just as she always has.

Except this time it’s with eyes that look wet from the eye drops she keeps in her purse, not the overly fake smile that she had spent too many years practicing in front of the mirror.  

There’s nobody sitting in the audience to accuse her of lying, to force her to admit her own role in things.

The one report that would sits there prim and proper with a knowing smile on her face that Toni wishes she could return.

The only time they even ask about the Iron Man is at the closure, asking what Stark Industries will do to handle this breach of security, if they will do anything to combat this threat to the American ideal of security, and to avenge one of the company’s former board members.

She lets out a tight almost strangled laugh at the question, twists her face into something like a grimace, and just says, “let’s just say I have a personal interest in Iron Man,” before Pepper can get up onto the stage and usher her away.

\---

Nearly a year later, she’ll sit in a Washington DC courtroom staring down men that she doesn’t trust.

They’ll come up with little lies, little ways to push her.

They’re trying to get her to react, to be the emotional or reckless woman that they had all read about in the newspaper headlines.

One of the senators will lean forward and ask the same question that reporter asked before.

He’ll wonder if Stark Industries was ever going to do anything about the Iron Man, whom they all believe to have stolen his suit specs from her company.

He’ll ask if Stark Industries could use their old plans to make a suit for the government to use as protection.

And she’ll smile, the sweet sad smile that they expect of her, the proper look of a woman still mourning her _mentor_ and distraught with the reminder of the _villain_ that has caused her such pain, while she says, “I’ll _try_.”

 


End file.
